Books of The Times; Our Man in Havana

By WALTER GOODMAN

Published: December 26, 1987

William F. Buckley Jr. has dropped a lot of names since he introduced the gallant C.I.A. agent Blackford Oakes into the Queen of England's bedroom in his first spy novel, ''Saving the Queen.'' But the author surpasses himself in the eighth of the series, ''Mongoose, R.I.P.'' It's an international Who's Who, 1963 edition, featuring John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro and Nikita S. Khrushchev, along with their associates, friends and lovers. With the help of italics, Mr. Buckley takes us smack into President Kennedy's stream-of-consciousness, which in barely four pages summons up the following acquaintances: Acheson, Schlesinger and Rusk; U Thant, Churchill and Macmillan; Mac Bundy, John Bailey, Dick or Rich Goodwin and Bobby; Clark Gable, Joe DiMaggio and Carole Lombard; Larry Spivak, James Reston, David Lawrence, Arthur Krock, Bill Manchester and Tad Szulc; Hoover, Tricky Dick and Mickey Mouse.

Blackford Oakes, ''his faded blond hair framing a sensitive and expressive face,'' is a boy's hero among men. In his latest foray in freedom's behalf, the clean-shaven Yalie of old American stock goes so far as to disguise himself as a Hasid. We rejoin Blackford not long after he has been freed from a Cuban prison, where he was under a sentence of execution for annoying Mr. Castro. Called on once again to deal with the Communist menace off the coast of Florida, he finds himself involved in assassination plots - against the Cuban leader, the American President and himself. To complicate matters, Blackford also has to deal with a Soviet missile left behind in Cuba to threaten the United States after the weapons had all supposedly been removed at the resolution of the 1962 missile crisis.

Since most readers can be expected to know who was assassinated in 1963 and who was not and whether the United States was struck by a nuclear missile, the kick of the novel has to come from the way the author connects the events - real, inferred, imagined - and carries them to climax. Mr. Buckley, though not above applying coincidence to grease his narrative, makes the connections adroitly and works up to the finale with satisfying zip.

Fidel Castro hogs the show. He is a stage Latin, who talks like this: ''Yes, Osvaldo, I think you reason well.'' In addition to being the target of several exotic assassination attempts, including one by a dark-haired sexpot who breathes to him ''soothingly and ardently,'' that she wishes ''that I might satisfy the greatest man to be born in this hemisphere in this century,'' he is also behind the plots to murder Blackford and President Kennedy and the missile threat.

Once again, Mr. Buckley, who is not at his strongest with female characters, brings on Sally Partridge, the love of Blackford's life, and for a chapter or two the page-turner becomes a page-flipper. We are informed of how the young folks met in their college days and shortly went to bed. It's not very stimulating; Blackford's lust for the lady is described but not delivered, and the relationship gets awfully earnest. When Sally goes off with another fellow, poor Blacky feels that his ''endless struggle'' no longer has any prospects for him, ''even if the whole world were to become, tomorrow, a free and fair city.''

Inside jokes come more easily to the author than inner whinings. On a plane from Miami to Mexico, Blackford passes the time with a book of letters from Whittaker Chambers to William F. Buckley Jr. The editor of The National Review is in form, too, as he takes a gentle poke at the fashionable left. Raul Castro describes the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as ''designed to get support from the -naturally simpaticos: cosmopolitan New York literary types.'' Among the supporters, he reports, are ''as you would expect, Fidel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir; and Herman Mailer - he is a big star in the American literary world who keeps saying he wishes to be 'president,' by which he means the leading American literary figure.''

Although Blackford is not given to the kind of existential angst that afflicts John le Carre's spies, he does seem to be getting more concerned over that naggy old issue of ends and means, especially assassinations. (''Operation Mongoose,'' Mr. Buckley notes in a postscript, was the name given by the C.I.A. to the schemes in 1961 and 1962 to kill Fidel Castro.) Unlike most spy thrillers, ''Mongoose, R.I.P.'' gains from Blackford's lack of success. Little goes right for our hero this time out - which opens up vast possibilities for the series. Clever Mr. Buckley could infiltrate Blackford into the center of the C.I.A.'s efforts to bring victory to the Nicaraguan contras, find moderates in Iran and take charge in Lebanon.